Displaying Service Manager Reports in SharePoint

As most may be aware, the reporting in Service Manager is an in-console experience. Having reporting in the console has some very direct benefits:

Users of Service Manager do not need to go to an external location to find that critical information that they need.

Users can run “contextualized” reports. This means that if users are in the incident view for example, they can select a particular incident and then choose to run a particular report related to that incident.

Users can have a richer experience to make sure that they are getting the right data they need easier.

We also recognize that there may be a need to share some reports out to a wider audience or higher level management that may not have a need for using the console on a day to day basis. There are some great features in SSRS that we can take advantage of such as running the reports in a browser, report delivery to file share, and email delivery. In today’s post we will talk about one of the less obvious ways which is to create your own composable reporting dashboard. We will accomplish that by showing you how to share particular reports through SharePoint page viewer.

Service Manager reporting is built directly on top of SQL Server Reporting Services and we integrate using the SSRS web services. What this means is that while you will see this in the console:

This is what is going on behind the scenes:

To be able to share the information from a report directly in a SharePoint site that is more widely available we need to do the following:

Assuming you have the right level of permissions, in the upper right of your SharePoint site there will likely be a site actions menu that will allow you to edit the page. Choosing “Edit Page” will put you into edit mode

Choose an area to add a web part and click “Add a Web Part”

You should get a web part selection catalog pop up. Select the “Page Viewer Web Part”

Now we will doctor the URL a bit to get rid of the parameter header and the toolbar by adding these parameters to the end &rc:Parameters=Collapsed&rc:Toolbar=false. For a full list of possible URL parameters, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152835.aspx. A sample URL would look like this:

Now add that link in the URL field in the Page Viewer Web Part tool pane. Click OK.

Now you should be able to see the report in the viewer web part while in edit mode. You can resize the web part view pane so that you can see all of the report. Once you have done that, exit out of edit mode and voila! view your report. I’ve added two reports to the screenshot below

Check out this link to see what other URL parameter options are there in SQL Server Reporting Services.

What do you think? Will this work for sharing your reports to a broader audience? Please add your input to the comments below.